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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28468401">slow motion, double vision</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/agrestenoir/pseuds/agrestenoir'>agrestenoir</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Miraculous Ladybug</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Kissing, Marichat, Romance, Secret Identity, Secret Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:48:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,928</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28468401</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/agrestenoir/pseuds/agrestenoir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>That Friday night was a turning point as she holds Chat Noir in her arms and dreams of a world where they don't have to hide.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, marichat - Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>187</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>slow motion, double vision</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For midnightseashell14 for ML Secret Santa 2020. </p><p>Happy holidays, lovely!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Night falls over Paris in a tidal wave of purples and golds, stars glittering over the dark sky as the moon hangs high over the horizon, and Marinette watches the city come to life from her balcony.</p><p>Passersby meander along the street below, drunken laughter and soft music echoing through the air. It’s a Friday evening, and normally she would be out with her friends or marathoning a movie with her parents on their living room sofa. But tonight, all she wants to do is spend it with the person who matters the most to her.</p><p>It’s not often that Marinette gets a quiet night with her boyfriend, either she’s too busy studying for exams or he’s patrolling the city for Hawkmoth (…or vice versa). The last three date nights they’d had together were interrupted by an akuma villain of some sort with Chat Noir dashing off to save the city and Marinette as Ladybug right behind him. It’s not the best situation to be caught in, but this is what happens when your superhero partner falls in love with your civilian self.</p><p>It should be known that Marinette never <em>actually</em> intended for this to happen. She tries to keep a solid line between her personal life and heroic one, which includes hiding her true identity from the one person who means the world to her. Chat Noir has always been someone precious—to both Ladybug and Marinette—so when things evolved from friendship on her terrace to kissing atop Saint Ambroise Church, she reluctantly decided to follow wherever their paths took her.</p><p>Perhaps someday, in the near or distant future, Marinette will be able to tell Chat Noir who she really is, but that is a story for another time.</p><p>Early hours of evening trickle by, swallowed up in navy darkness and moonlight, as she waits for Chat Noir to arrive. Marinette sits on a white wicker chair, wrapped in a pink knit blanket with a worn, dog-eared novel in her lap. Exhaustion lingers in the cob-webbed corners of her mind, but she pays it no heed, eager to spend quality time with her boyfriend. So she loses herself in her book, she lets time tick by until the creaking of her rod-iron railing pulls her from her reverie.</p><p>Chat Noir sits on the rail, hair tousled after jumping through the city on patrol. His cheeks are wind-kissed and pink, half-lidded green eyes staring at her with an emotion she can’t quite place. Clad in his typical black Kevlar-leather suit, he nods his head in greeting as his lips press into a grin. He looks well, so there was no incidents during patrol, but the the dark circles under his eyes and thinness of his smile shows how tired and worn he truly is. She wonders if he’s been getting any sleep lately.</p><p>“Hey, you,” Marinette says. Her voice is soft over the evening air, but Chat Noir still hears her all the same. “How was patrol?”</p><p>“Same old, same old,” Chat Noir tells her, shrugging helplessly. Marinette studies him for a moment as the clutch of his shoulders and jaw clench loosen ever so slightly. It makes her heart pound harder because he feels at ease—<em>with her</em>—in a way that Ladybug can never attain. “Stopped a mugging down Rue Teresa but that’s about it.”</p><p>Marinette laughs. “How ordinary of you.”</p><p>His body shakes with his own laughter, but Marinette can see even more if she dares to look. It’s the tremble in his hands as he pushes off the rail, the heaviness his limbs hold when he drops to the ground to sit at her feet, the way his eyes droop as he rests his head against her thigh. Chat Noir is exhausted, plain and simple, and it hurts her to watch him try to push through it.</p><p>“You should sleep,” she tells him simply.</p><p>His shoulders heave at her comment, a sputter falling from his lips like a dead engine turning over. “It’s date night.”</p><p>Marinette tangles her fingers in his hair as she brushes it away from his face, trying to stroke some calmness into his calamity. “We can always postpone it.”</p><p>“We’ve postponed it <em>three times</em> already.”</p><p>Marinette hums in thought and continues running her hand through his hair. Chat Noir’s eyes slide closed as he settles fully against her, relaxed for the first time in a long while. They sit in the quiet as Marinette watches the slow rise and fall of his chest, wondering if it would be possible to lure her boyfriend into a slumber on the terrace. She has some more blankets and pillows she could bring up from her bedroom, and it wouldn’t be the first time she’s accidentally fallen asleep out here.</p><p>But the fact remains that Chat Noir is visible to all of Paris up here, and even though they’re cautious when he comes over, there’s no possible way they can be vigilante while asleep.</p><p>“Yeah, three times.” She shrugs and puts her book down on the side table. “Honestly, what’s one more?”</p><p>Chat Noir’s expression softens, and he turns to look up at her. “Are you mad at me?”</p><p>“Not for any of this.” With a sigh, Marinette slips out of her chair and slides down to sit next to her boyfriend, pulling her blanket around the both of them. “When’s the last time you got a good night’s sleep?”</p><p>“Couple days ago.”</p><p>“Any particular reason?”</p><p>Chat Noir doesn’t respond, instead reaching for one of her hands and clasping it between his. He intertwines their fingers together, claws pricking along the soft skin of the back of her palm, but Marinette doesn’t mind. She leans forward and presses a light kiss to his knuckles, blue eyes alight with amusement when it makes his ears turn a bright pink.</p><p>As lovely as it is to spend these precious, intimate moments together, Marinette won’t let him avoid the topic forever. “You worried about Hawkmoth?”</p><p>Hawkmoth seems to be the ghost that lingers around Chat Noir’s nightmares as of late, and she has spent too many a nights herself wrapped in suffocating darkness, wondering if there will ever come a day that the supervillain would kill them and destroy Paris. She doesn’t mean to lose herself in the fear, but sometimes fear is unavoidable. You can only hope to cope with it and press on.</p><p>“Some,” Chat Noir finally relents, licking his lips in thought. “But I’ve mostly been worried about… Well, <em>you</em>, I guess.”</p><p>“You’ve been worried about me?” Marinette asks, raising a brow in confusion. “What for?”</p><p>Chat Noir squeezes her hand. “With everything going on lately, it’s been getting hard to do… anything. There are more akumas, Hawkmoth is getting more dangerous. And I want to spend more time with you, but I still haven’t told Ladybug, and I already know how she’s going to react—”</p><p>Her hands are pressing against his shoulders, trying to soothe his frenzied nerves. “Hey, <em>hey</em>—what do you mean?”</p><p>“Everything is—”</p><p>“About Ladybug.”</p><p>“Oh.” Chat Noir’s voice trails off, carried away by the blustery wind zipping through the city. He rests his head against hers, sighing as his gaze turns out and away from her. “I’ve been thinking lately that I want to tell Ladybug about you… and about us.”</p><p>She pauses, tilting her head to stare at him. “I thought you wanted us to be a secret.”</p><p>Chat Noir shrugs helplessly, tired eyes falling down to his hands clenched into tight fists in his lap. “I still do, but I’m starting to think that I don’t want to keep from the people who matter, you know? Because, even though Hawkmoth is everywhere, there’s people who I trust, Mari, and… Ladybug’s one of them. But I’m scared that she won’t accept it.”</p><p>Marinette stops and tries to catch her breath. She imagines Chat Noir in a restless slumber, tangled in cold sheets as he worries about the future with Marinette and the future he owes his partner. It seems funny to her that he worries about Ladybug’s reaction, because even if Chat Noir weren’t dating Marinette and was hopelessly in love with someone else, she’d still want the best for her partner—for him to be happy.</p><p>She’s never tried looking at Ladybug through Chat Noir’s eyes though. In his mind, he sees a heroine hellbent on keeping Paris and those she loves safe from harm—at the risk of herself as she’s done countless times before. Ladybug knowing Chat Noir was willingly putting a civilian in Hawkmoth’s path at the off chance of him being happy… It’s not something she’s ever considered before, or something they’ve ever had to deal with.</p><p>It’s no wonder he’s scared.</p><p>“I’m sure Ladybug would be okay with it,” Marinette says, trying to toe the line between girlfriend and partner. God, what corner has she backed them into?</p><p>“You don’t know her like I do.”</p><p>“You’d be surprised.” Marinette presses a quick kiss to the corner of his lips, lingering, hot puffs of air tickling the skin of his cheek. “She’s your partner, Chat Noir. It sounds like she just wants the best for you.”</p><p>“Sometimes the best for me isn’t something I agree with.” He shakes his head, green eyes piercing through her heart. “If I had it my way, there’d be nothing between me and Ladybug—no masks, no secrets, <em>nothing</em>. But to keep her and everyone I care about safe, I can’t do that. To keep <em>you</em> safe… I can’t even tell you my name.”</p><p>“You should tell her,” Marinette says softly. Her hands come up to cradle his face between them, bringing him close so that their foreheads are resting against each other. “You said you trust her, right? You have to trust that she’ll be okay with this.”</p><p>“But how do you know for sure?” His voice is raspy, strained to its limits.</p><p>For a moment, Marinette wavers. Everything in her body is screaming at her to pull away and avoid this conversation while her heart aches and aches to tell him the truth. That distant future she thought of—telling her partner about her real identity—it might come sooner, rather than later.</p><p>“I just have a good feeling about it,” is all she can manage right now. Marinette presses her lips against Chat Noir’s in a soft kiss, continues to whisper against them, “The same way I had a good feeling about you.”</p><p>Chat Noir sinks into the kiss, his fingers reaching up to tangle in her loose hair. The two sit in silence for a while, trading hushed <em>I missed you</em>’s and kisses back and forth as Chat Noir continues to relax against her. Unease still brims on the horizon as Marinette struggles under the weight of her duty to Paris, her duty to her partner, and her duty to herself. But at the end of the day, all that matters is keeping those she loves safe and happy, and if that means giving away the truth of who she really is to Chat Noir… it’s not something she’d ever be against.</p><p>In the quiet, she whispers to him, “I love you, Chat Noir.”</p><p>And Chat Noir holds onto her, his touch burning fire across his skin, as he whispers back, “Me too, Marinette.”</p><p>And so into the Parisian evening time trickles by, and the two lose themselves in the soft intimacy they hold between them, and Marinette tries to picture a future where they won’t have to hide it all away.</p>
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